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The New World of Legal Highs

Uncontrolled Substances: How The Chemical Underground is Going Mainstream. By Mike Power.  Matter, Kindle Single, $.99.

Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz

 

I've been reading and writing about drugs and addiction for over a quarter century (yikes!) so I'm somewhat curmudgeonly in this area: what's news to many isn't likely to be so to me, and even the most egregious errors can only enrage you a certain number of times before you develop, unfortunately, at least some degree of tolerance.

But Mike Power's new Matter ebook, Uncontrolled Substances, is different. 

Power avoids both the clichés and the errors,  delivering a compelling story about a genuinely new development in the drugs world: the advent of so-called "legal highs." These are new synthetic substances similar to illegal drugs that are sold over-the-counter at head shops and convenience stories, often winkingly labeled as apparently innocuous products like "bath salts" or "plant food."

Often never even tested first on animals, the drugs are typically manufactured in Chinese factories and distributed globally via the internet. They range from marijuana-like products to those aimed at mimicking psychedelics or stimulants.

Power takes us into the story in several ways: by describing the difficulties faced by E.R. doctors dealing with overdoses and bad reactions to the substances, by telling the stories of key chemists, and by seeking to have a Chinese company produce a sample of a stimulant once taken legally by the Beatles, John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe that was pulled from the market in 1971. Power weaves these elements together seamlessly, while describing the difficulties that the new substances present to public health and regulators.

Synthetic drugs reveal a fundamental flaw in the foundation of the current international drug control regime, which is its irrationality. It is impossible to make a scientific case for a system that makes cigarettes and alcohol legal for recreational use, some opioids legal in some places for pain relief, and marijuana completely illegal. This means there are no objective criteria in existing law for determining which of the new drugs should be legal and which should not be.

Regulators have tried to address the problem by banning "chemical analogues" of illegal drugs, but this, again, runs into science: drugs that are structurally similar can have very different effects, and drugs that are completely dissimilar structurally can be pharmacologically alike. Simply banning every new drug as it appears also runs into issues with pharma: prohibit willy-nilly and you may unwittingly be blocking cures for cancer, Alzheimer's or depression.

As Power notes, even the hardliners at the United Nations Office of Drug Control Policy admitted in their World Drug Report this year that the system is "floundering" in its attempts to deal with the problem: one in 12 adults worldwide has at least tried one of the drugs.

Uncontrolled Substances offers a fascinating introduction to the issue--but it may, like many drugs, leave you craving more. In this case, however, I highly recommend it!

[Disclosure: I am writing a forthcoming ebook for Matter, with a different editor]

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and other publications. She is author, most recently of Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered , with Bruce Perry, M.D. Ph.D. Her next book, Unbroken Brain, will examine addiction as a developmental disorder.

The Wrong Way to Write about Epigenetics and Violence

"The Ghost in the Cell," by Scott C. Johnson. Published by Matter. Available via Web, ePub, Kindle. $.99.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

It's a prize that scientists have sought since the early nineteenth century: a biological marker that predicts violent behavior in humans. In the 1830s, phrenologists believed head bumps could reveal a criminal personality -- often, prostitutes and the poor were said to have bumps that marked them as deviants from birth. But today, it seems this pursuit may have moved beyond the realm of pseudoscience.

Thanks to recent discoveries, we have evidence that the genes of abused children are marked by the experience. Over time, these effects leave them prone to depression and make it harder for them to control their violent impulses. Could we be on the cusp of discovering a scientific approach to a social problem? In an essay for Matter magazine, former war correspondent Scott C. Johnson suggests that we are. Unfortunately, Johnson fails spectacularly to explain the complexity of this problem, and winds up telling a story that distorts both the science and the reality of abuse in many people's lives.

In Search Of Our Inner Salamander

Electric Shock:  How Electricity Could Be The Key To Human Regeneration. by Cynthia Graber. Matter, Kindle,  $0.99

The dystopic science fiction author Richard K. Morgan writes stories of regeneration taken to the limit. In his Takeshi Kovacs series, the wealthy or otherwise privileged among humankind (or post-humans) continuously download consciousness –memories, knowledge, personality, everything that makes a self – into hardened storage that can be transplanted from body to newly produced body.  Among much else, these books are meditations on immortality and its discontents, for in Kovacs’ universe, there is death – when one’s body or “sleeve” ceases to function – and the “real death” that occurs when that encapsulated solid-state self gets annihilated.  It’s a complicated dream, this vision in which minds persist in infinitely renewable (and/or interchangeable) bodies.

In 21^st century science, the ambition is a little more grounded; scientists studying the regeneration of organs, tissues and body parts can be said to suffer amphibian-envy.  As Cynthia Graber writes at the start of Electric Shock, “the axolotl, or Mexican salamander, has the ability to regenerate everything from its limbs and tail to its spinal chord and skin…”*  Humans? Not so much:  livers and skin can (partly) replace themselves, and children below the age of twelve, Graber writes, can rebuild fingertips they might be unlucky enough to lose.

Thus the premise for Graber’s story:  what if it were possible to discover how to rebuild much more of the human body at any point in its lifecycle?  Or rather – what if someone out there right now thinks he can make that happen, and soon?

What follows is an elegant bending of a very familiar genre, the common magazine trope of the scientist – profile.  Graber traces the career of biologist Michael Levin from his émigré childhood to his current pursuit of an off-center approach to the problem of mammalian (target: human) regeneration.  Where almost all the attention in the engineering of human tissue has focused on questions of genetics and – at the cellular level – on the manipulation of stem cells.  Such approaches have had their successes, but if the goal is to tell some tissue to “become an arm” then, Levin's story argues, something else is required. 

That something else is the stuff of Dr. Frankenstein’s dreams:  manipulation of the electrical signaling that takes place in every cell in the body.  Graber follows the conventions of profile-writing by taking her readers through a quick tour of Levin’s early life.  We learn he was born in Moscow, brought by his parents to Lynn, Massachusetts at the age of nine, and early showed talent for computers and fascination with the living world.  The catalyst for a life’s work came for Levin at 17, when he chanced upon a book called The Body Electric, written by Robert Becker, a surgeon with an unorthodox streak (to put it kindly).

The book had its excesses, but Levin responded immediately to its reports of lost experiments that had played with electric currents to spark regeneration in marine animals. During his Ph.D work, he seemed to outward appearance to have returned to more conventional biological interests, performing significant experiments on the genetics and biochemistry of development.  But once ensconsed in his own lab, Graber writes, Levin returned to the question of bioelectric signals and the possibility, ultimately, that he could persuade a human arm or eye grow back.

The balance of Graber’s text – roughly the last half – tells what Levin has been able to achieve so far, from growing a four headed flatworm (its own bridge game!) to experiments – still in progress – through which Levin and his collaborators now hope to persuade a mouse finger to grow, replacing an amputated digit.  The most riveting moment in Graber’s account isn’t that one, though.  That falls to Levin’s colleague Dany Adams, who discovered (and partly stumbled upon) a technique for mapping the sequence of electrical signals in cells that map the structure to be developed before that structure begins to form.

Graber’s science writing chops show up here as she manages to convey both the vivid sense of the moment and the explanation of what her readers glimpse in their minds’ eyes.  At the same time she gently – perhaps too much so – points to the big question that (this account, at least) of Levin’s work leaves unanswered:  what is the mechanistic role bioelectric signaling plays in a sequence of events that ends at “eye” or “digit.”

That hints at the one gap I found in Electric Shock.  Levin’s work, Graber told me, is viewed as solid, excellent science by the small community that works on bioelectric questions  But Graber’s account does not return to the question she raises at the beginning, on the interplay between Levin’s view of the body electric and the genetic and cellular processes involved in building new tissues, organs, parts. I grasped Levin’s drive, his pursuit, and his impressive record of successful experiments from this text.  I didn’t get that last step, at least not explicitly:  how Levin’s off-the-beaten-path approach to regeneration fits into the larger corpus of work on the ways organisms build bodies.

That’s a lot to ask of a relatively brief text, of course, and to be clear, I don’t think either that Graber should have written a tome on developmental biology, nor that Electric Shock fails to deliver on its core promise of a gripping story about science told through the life of one passionate scientist. 

But what lifts Electric Shock out of the common run of profiles, is the use Graber makes of the license given her by the fact of e-publication as opposed to a dead-tree assignment.  As Virginia Hughes wrote in this space recently, not all feature stories benefit from the elbow room e-published non-fiction novellas offer.  Graber's text does, going long to reach through the biographic narrative into the sophisticated ideas behind Levin’s work, and thus welcoming its readers to enter into the arguments his experiments seek to test.  But the insight thus gained evokes more questions, the desire to got yet another step into the inquiry.  That’s a good result – recall the show business adage to always leave the punters wanting more – but there’s  a tricky side to this intermediate length: it’s not always easy to see whether you’ve finished the job.

With that caveat – hell, I’ll even cop to a quibble -- the bottom line remains. It's a long leap from evoking a mouse digit to the dreams (or nightmares) of science fiction. But the fascination with the possibility of mastering life's processes -- maybe even the whiff of making mortalitiy malleable -- is common to both.  Electric Shock tells the real story of where that curiousity may lead, the one that's happening now, in a finely wrought account of an intriguing figure.  And all for a price that leaves you change out of a buck!

*Full disclosure:  the piece was edited by my MIT and Download the Universe colleague Seth Mnookin.

Images:  Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, 1492, and  Studies of Embryos, 1510-1513.

Tom Levenson writes books (most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits.  His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others.  By day he professes science writing at MIT.

Word Rising: In Long-Form Journalism, How Long Is Too Long?

Uprising, by Phil McKenna. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Review by Virginia Hughes

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama made several nods to climate change. To reduce America’s dependence on oil — and the carbon emissions that come from burning it — he pushed for a bigger investment in clean sources of energy, like wind, solar and natural gas. “The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence,” Obama said. “We need to encourage that.”

Thanks to advances in a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, natural gas production in the U.S. grew by 8 percent in 2011, the sixth consecutive year of growth, leading the International Energy Agency to call this “a golden age of gas.” When burned, natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal does. The Obama administration and some prominent scientists — including Obama’s pick for new energy secretary — say natural gas could be used as a “bridge fuel,” curbing our coal consumption until greener alternatives are ready for primetime.

But what if natural gas isn’t so clean?

That’s the question artfully raised in Uprising, the fourth installment from Matter, an online platform for long-form science journalism. Uprising, like Matter’s earlier stories, presents an engaging narrative with juicy characters doing surprising science at a length of around 6,000 words. Unlike the other Matter stories, though, I’m not sure this one needed more than the 3,000 words of a typical magazine feature.

In Uprising, journalist Phil McKenna tells the story of two unlikely collaborators — Bob Ackley, a big-car-loving libertarian with decades of experience as a gas company technician, and Nathan Phillips, a liberal tree-hugging professor — and their wacky adventures cruising the streets of Boston to map natural gas leaks.

When methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere (rather than being burned) it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But nobody knows exactly how much gas is leaking. That’s where Ackley and Phillips come in.

Uprising tells why Ackley and Phillips started to work together, and what they’ve discovered so far: In a paper published last month in Environmental Pollution, they reported finding 3,356 leaks in Boston, including six where gas levels were high enough to cause an explosion. Their study included a city map tracking the leaks, which Matter recreated as a striking black-and-white grid with swashes of red and yellow to indicate the leaks. (And although the study is behind a pay wall, Matter made it somewhat open-access by linking to a Google Doc of the study’s full data set.)

The problem, for me, is that it’s unclear how (or whether) this single study contributes to the greater international debate about natural gas and climate that McKenna did such a great job setting up. The study focused on the number of leaks, rather than their volume, so it can’t say anything definitive about whether natural gas really is worse for the climate than coal.

It’s not that these investigations don’t matter: We learn that Ackley and others are finding similarly frightening numbers of leaks in other cities, such as Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and that some of this data is driving a major lawsuit against a utility company. It’s entirely plausible that these leaks will put a crimp on the natural gas boom. But the story doesn’t say much about how the wider energy community has reacted to this data. It didn’t include any skeptical voices, or any comments from scientists or policy makers who still believe in natural gas as a bridge fuel.

I was expecting the story to answer the initial question posed: What if natural gas isn’t so clean? And when I didn’t get that answer, I was disappointed, in a way that I might not have been had the story been shorter. The view, for me, wasn’t quite worth the climb.

 

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, and Slate, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

Behind the scenes with "Electric Shock," Matter's new ebook on regeneration

"Electric Shock" by Cynthia Graber. Published by Matter. $0.99. Available online and for Kindle, iPad, and others.

by Seth Mnookin

Last spring, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, a pair of British journalists who'd written for everywhere from The New York Times and The Guardian to Economist and Wired, announced their intention to launch Matter. It felt, to many of us in the science-writing racket, like a quixotic effort: Was there really pent-up demand for in-depth, independent reportage that covered breaking news about science within the parameters of long-form non-fiction?

To answer 'yes' to that question required ignoring decades-long secular trends in journalism. Legacy news organizations ranging from CNN to my hometown paper, The Boston Globe, have been jettisoning specialized science reporters since the late 1990s. As profits disappeared and newsroom budgets shrank, "in-depth" projects became rarer and rarer. This is hardly a surprise. Nuanced, investigative reports have always been the equivalent of newsroom money pits: They require (relatively) highly paid reporters and editors, they don't produce a lot of copy relative to the amount of effort needed, and they don't typically deal with subjects advertisers want to be associated with. (Can you think of any companies that'd be eager to pitch their wares alongside this excellent Times series on the abuse of developmentally disabled patients in New York State group homes? Me neither.)

Matter: A Look At A New Way To Read About Science

Do No Harm, by Anil Ananthaswamy. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Talk about burying the lead.

Yesterday the Washington Post announced that they were hiring a new editor-in-chief. Reporting for the New York Times, Christine Haughney wrote that the Post made the switch because they were struggling with a steep decline in readership. It's not until deep in the piece that Haughney makes a startling statement:

"The paper also faces fresh competition from online news outlets, like Politico, whose founders include former Washington Post reporters."

Politico certainly didn't bring the Washington Post to its current moment of crisis singlehandedly. But it is striking to me that a web operation started from scratch in 2007 could baloon so fast that it could become a major threat to what was once one of the world's leading newspapers.

My attention was drawn to this buried lead because I've recently been getting to know a new player in the science news business, called Matter. This morning they are launching their web site, and their first piece of long-form journalism. It's way too early to predict whether Matter will become the Politico of the science world. But they definitely are entering the arena with impressive style.